Giving the Guru the green light

By Laura Dearden,
Account Director
28/10/2016

Greetings, followers of the DC website. It is I, Laura.

You’re probably already acquainted with The Guru, but just in case you’ve been off on your flying carpet, he’s the Comparison Master and was created by us as part of a brand launch project for one of our clients Quint. Money Guru compares more financial products than any other comparison website, and offers invaluable advice along with the latest deals on loans, credit cards, mortgages and life insurance.

As part of the brand launch, we wanted to spread some of The Guru’s love and financial wisdom across the nation, and so turned to TV. I was lucky enough to be part of the action when it came to producing the ad and we used a technique called ‘green screen’ (also known as Chroma Key Compositing for all you geeks out there), to give it that extra edge. Basically, it means you film against a plain green background.

The beauty about green screen is that it allows you to be much more creative, for example, the bit where we show the many eyes of the Guru. This technique is how most of the ‘wizardry’ is done in films like Harry Potter. However, it does also mean you need to have a lot of creative vision in order to picture the end result, which our Director, Ben Craig, has in spades. There’s not much to see when you’re actually on the shoot, though we did use some pretty interesting props – anyone seen my cuddly toy elephant?

After a fair bit of editing magic from our friends at Fond Films, we’re all pretty chuffed with how great the finished ad looks.